Lighting systems are currently being integrated with vehicle systems and components to provide a unique lighting appearance to the driver and passengers of the vehicle. Further, accent lighting can be installed on the exterior of the vehicle for personalized ascetics. With each lighting system having a separate source of light and associated light settings (on/off/intensity/color/etc. . . . ), there exists a need for a light control system and methods to control each of the lighting systems in the vehicle.
U.S. published application 20050111231, to Crodian et al., shows a customizable lighting system including control of brightness and timing parameters of a plurality of lights. However, the methods and system described in Crodian et al. rely on clock cycles and duty cycles to control the brightness of the lights in a sequential light pattern.
Currently, there are no methods to propagate light settings of a light emitting device to other light emitting devices in a single step for efficiency and an optimized Human Machine Interface (HMI). Depending on the architecture, illumination in the interior of a vehicle is accomplished through various methods. Some OEMs have a separate lighting control circuit contained within each device and others execute light control through the vehicle network.
It would be desirable to have a unified lighting system including a plurality of light emitting devices, wherein each light emitting device generates a color output in response to a plurality of light settings and a modification to the light settings of one light emitting device is automatically propagated to the other light emitting devices, thereby providing a substantially uniform color output of the lighting system.